That kind of playing... just wow. I play guitar and I can't fathom being that disciplined. I'm not any good though. I know guys who are and I'm always astonished. Some people just have what it takes I guess.
Probably 100,000 girls all over the world that started playing violin exact same year, exact same age..I'm guessing she probably started 4-6 years old. Only 100 of them get any good, only one or two make it to virtuoso. More than just practice or talent, personality type - not throwing tantrums wanting to play with other kids, absolute pitch Even bone structure of the hand. Not only doesnt she make a single mistake, several times in that piece you have to come down with the bow, hit the string perfect to get the right note. Fooking hard. Seen some prodigies in my time, but jeezus, another level above practice and raw talent
I have ADHD. I was not diagnosed as a child. I have the type that presents primarily as inattentiveness, but that is a misunderstood misnomer. I could pay attention. I had to want to. I paid attention to my bass, all fucking day. I focused on the basslines in all I heard. I listened to music all the time once my mother realized how desperately I needed a sound system in my bedroom, and a Walkman to cope with the world. I played the bass 40 hours a week at home. I played 5 hours in school. I also had private instruction. I also always belonged to a separate children's orchestra or quartet. By the time I was 12, I played in Carnegie Hall twice (with orchestras; bass is not a soloist instrument), Lincoln Center countless times, and turned down a third invitation to Carnegie Hall because my grandma had offerred to take me on a cruise. One of my trips to Carnegie Hall was to share the music stand with the second bassist of the NY Pops, who had been giving me private lessons that year. I started playing when I was 9. I attribute this to hyperfocus on my bass, which led to a minimum of 40 hours a week playing it, lessons so that my 40 hours was spent developing good habits, not bad, opportunities to develop ensemble skills, which is totally different from playing alone, and natural talent, inherited from my father who made his living as a bass player. But the absolute most important thing was all that practice. Practice. Practice. Practice. That really is how you get to Carnegie Hall.
Groan If you have never been diagnozed, you dont have ADHD You wouldnt have had the "hyperfocus" to practice the bass 40 hrs a week if you actually had ADHD. The "type that presents primarily as inattentiveness" Uh, huh, and what would the clinical name of that type be then? VGs Diagnosis: You were just as neurotic and awkward as every other teenage girl at the time. and you are just making stuff up now to re-write your nerdy past
I wasn't diagnosed AS A CHILD. I was diagnosed after several horrifyingly boring hours of psychological evaluation as an adult. So then I take it you are NOT a clinician. If you were, you would know some pretty fucking basic things about ADHD. Not only is hyperfocus a primary symptom of ADHD, it's the main reason most little girls do not get diagnosed until they are women. You asked for a clinical name? ADHD Inattentive presentation. There are three ways in which ADHD presents. Hyperactive, inattentive, or a combination. ADHD is, for fucks sake, NOT an inability to focus. It is a disorder that impacts executive function in the brain, making it difficult to ignore impulses, or focus, or (and here's where I struggle the most) SWITCH FOCUS FROM ONE TASK TO ANOTHER. The inability to shift focus to a new task is called what? Hyperfocus. Go read a book or some protocols before you mouth off about something outside your wheelhouse. VG is not qualified to make diagnoses regarding what is and is not neurotypical. I don't want to re-write a nerdy past. I am still nerdy. I will always be nerdy.
Well, it gets dangerous when you say stuff like Hyperfocus is the main reason little girls dont get diagnosed until they are women. You know full well thats not true. Twice as many males get diagnosed as females, and most of those females diagnozed as ADHD-PI: predominantly inattentive Hyperfocus is not a primary symptom, and you should know full well there is no concensus on it even being a negative symptom or even being part of the condition Hyperfocus is intense concentration in particular, usually repetitive tasks. Half the people reading this, once reminded, will remember back to the news special they once saw of a kid spending endless hours doing jigsaw puzzles or building specific things with lego. Switching focus to a socially relevant task is secondary to that ADHD -PI Predominantly Inattentive is the clinical name. The P stands for predominantly, not Presentation Practicing bass 40 hrs a week for years to get to the stage where you are on stage at Carnegie hall means you would have gone through a whole set of tasks set by someone else, a tutor or otherwise, a whole bunch of tasks, you would have to change focus with. No one is going to buy it was ADHD as soon as you mention the bass thing, that just doesnt add up
Uh, no. What tutors or teachers do you know of who assign 8 hours of practice work a day? I practiced what I wanted to practice, unaware of passing time. Other people wanted me to do homework and chores. I just played my base from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. 5 days a week. I would have done it every day but my schedule didn't allow that. Typically, I did a warm up which included scales arpeggios and beginner pieces from a book. Eventually I had all of the beginner pieces memorized. Each day I worked on one peice from the several orchestras I participated in. Just one. I could spend weeks perfecting a single phrase. If I stopped, it was always because I had been holding the contents of my bladder nearly to failure, or I wanted to run ideas for the fingering or count for a specific passage by my father, who was not only my first private teacher (after my mother begged him to teach me so she wouldn't have to pay someone) and the only person whose praise of my progress mattered to me. I would then practice what he advised until 11PM. I did make sure to hit at least one piece from each orchestra pr small emsemble every week. If I didn't practice something we were doing in a large orchestra, nobody noticed. I was good enough to get by. But my small ensembles were usually led by my private instructors. They always knew. Mind you, my bedtime was supposed to be 9. I would get a gentle suggestion to bathe for bed at 8. If I played after my grandmother turned on the news in her bedroom at 11, she would complain to my mother, and my mother always violently punished any inconvenience to her mother. So, whenever I heard the music that meant the news was starting, I loosened my strings and my bow, and put my bass away. Meanwhile, in school, I made okay grades, but never finished classwork, and rarely turned in homework. I was just a good test taker, except in math. I was finally, in high school, diagnosed with discalculia. I had developed coping skills by instinct, which masked discalculia until I got to algebra, after logic in middle school. My math teacher then knew something was wrong, because I aced logic, but couldn't complete assignments. She found that I nearly always answered correctly, but took much longer than I should to get to the right answers. She tried to have me diagnosed, but the school refused to have me tested because I was in the 99th percentile in reading comprehension, and they considered my 52nd percentile in mathematics adequate. They did not want to have to risk spending resource room funds on me. The teacher tutored me before school every day and I kept up with the class, but ran out of time and could not complete enough of the standardized test required to pass the class. So, I repeated that class in high school. Twice. My teacher during the year was also my summer school teacher. He continued to push and push for me to be tested. A diagnosis would guarantee me the extra time I needed to pass standardized math tests. The school refused, again because a diagnosis would have legally obligated the school to allocate funds for certain resources for me. That teacher spoke with my next teacher, (I guess that was trig, but that's not what the NYCBOE called it) and together they pushed for testing. The school got a new psychologist, and he agreed to do the preliminary screening that is required before the school can send a student to the BOE for testing. He diagnosed me as having discalculia, and recommended further testing. The school said if my mother pushed for that testing, they would expell me and let my next school test me. It was the best school in the city, and my mother didn't want that. The psychologist was disturbed by the school's position, and presented a method for teaching me math. It wasn't practical to make my teacher use this method in class, so he chose a student who had either gym or a free period in common with me, and had us in his office so he could teach that student how to teach me. I kept up with the class as a result, but still wasn't legally eligible for unlimited time on standardized tests, and took every math class at least twice. Math was the only homework I consistently turned in, because I did it with my tutor. It was also the only subject I really needed to do any homework in. I still couldn't finish classwork in my other classes. I just ran out of time. Nobody understood why. It was assumed I was simply refusing to do the work. I wasn't. Lord knows the regular beatings I got were highly motivational. I was very incentivized to complete the work. I just couldn't. But unlike in trig and pre-cal, I understood the lessons. I read my textbooks on my own time, did homework during lunch if a concept was difficult or entertaining. I knew the subject matter. Eventually, to stop the beatings, I made up my own classwork assignments so my notebooks would be full. But I stopped going to class. I couldn't handle sitting quietly and trying to pay attention when I already knew the material. A friend in the attendance office deleted my absences. So, my mother only found out I had stopped going to class twice a year. Only two beatings total instead of several a week. When I was sent to do things in another room, I often had no idea what I had been sent for by the time I got there. I lost my things all the time. Time always seemed to sneak up on me. I found it difficult to prioritize tasks. I found it difficult to know when it was time to let a task go and do something else. Or, I could sit to do a task (such as classwork) get nothing accomplished, and have no idea what I had spent several hours on, or how it could be possible that hours had passed. The reason most girls who have ADHD do not get diagnosed as children is that girls, far more often than boys, are primarily inattentive, not hyperactive. They only have poor grades; they do not disrupt others. They are told they are lazy, not applying themselves, but because they know they are trying very hard and nobody believes them, they become depressed. Isolated. They give up on academics. All of this masks the signs, or used to. It's textbook these days, but still little girls often go undiagnosed unless they are hyperactive. Even the poor impulse control that often manifests as hyperactivity in boys tends to manifest differently in girls. So I got a word wrong. Big deal. I didn't go look at any of my psych evals to answer you, just memory of what it said, and what the three shrinks involved said to me. (Well, two of them; I never met the third, but his signature is on the report.) The first two days (a month apart) of evaluation were spent answering questions about my past and present. The next day (weeks later) was several hours of testing. I recognized some of the tests as having been given to me as a child. The results were the same, and demonstrated difficulty with spacial awareness. Or something like that. Again, I don't walk around with the reports in my purse, and I'm not a clinician. There were also tests I was given as a child that did not come up in this testing. However, the child psychologists my mother dragged me to and the psychiatrists who tested me as an adult said the same thing, more or less. I have difficulty with my understanding of time and space. One of the shrinks said I had a very high aptitude for learning and for communication, but that my brain needed more RAM. My lowest intelligence marker other than processing speed was in the low 80's in terms of percentile, with most being in the high 90's. My processing speed is in the mid-30's or 40's, I don't remember which. This too, was relayed to me as being a sign that executive function is impaired, and was one of many factors that went into the diagnosis. When discussing my history with me, one of the shrinks said that spending 8 hours at a time, mostly working on small pieces of full symphonies, should have been disclosed to the child psychologists and should have signaled a need for further evaluation. I didn't bother to tell him that I stopped going to counseling in elementary school, and didn't start learning the bass until middle school. (I started in 5th grade when I was 9, but didn't get a bass at home until I was 10, and didn't start the 40 hour practice schedule until some time after that. It wasn't instant.) He is the one who used the word hyperfocused. Neither of us viewed it as a negative, but rather a deviation from neurotypical behavior that was advantageous in that way. Non-stop practice and playing got me into the calibre of orchestras and ensembles that get invited to play Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. I'm pretty sure he was thinking at that early stage that autism couldn't be ruled out, but in the end, it was. We agree that if I had been neurotypical, I likely would not have practiced the way I did. Sure, I got my parent's height, and my fathers slim, lengthy, dexterous fingers. Sure I got my father's ear. Keeping time did not come naturally. Finding the best, most efficient, warmest sounding fingering often did not come by instinct. I practiced 40 hours a week at home, had 5 hours of instruction in school, orchestra practice, small group instruction and private lessons on Saturday. I played constantly. THAT. Is how you get to Carnegie Hall, just lile the old addage says. Practice. Practice. Practice. It's cute that you spent two minutes on Google and expect me to trust you more than my own doctors. Adorbs.
